16 and Pregnant, No Easy Decision recap

Editor’s note: In a series of guest entries Stephanie Sylverne is recapping MTV’s reality show 16 and Pregnant.

Last night, for the first time, MTV ended the season with a special on abortion. As Dr. Drew Pinsky says at the beginning of the show, there is no way to talk about abortion in a manner that will please everyone. Still, abortion is a decision any woman confronted with an unplanned pregnancy must wrestle with. Sylverne explains:

Until the No Easy Decision special aired last night, MTV only featured pregnant young women who chose to parent or place their babies for adoption. According to the Guttmacher Institute nearly a third of teenage pregnancies end in abortion and about 40 percent of all women will have an abortion by age 45, but these stories had not been featured on the show. So far on 16 and Pregnant, abortion has only been mentioned in passing. This makes some sense considering most of the girls featured on the show are from the Bible Belt, which has a high rate of parenting teens and where abortion is highly frowned upon and relatively inaccessible. It does not surprise me that most of the girls barely gave abortion a second thought.

Markai and James were on the most recent season of 16 and Pregnant when they had their daughter Za’karia. Eight months after Kari, as they call her, was born, Markai found out she was pregnant again after missing a Depo Provera shot. Teen Mom‘s Amber had a couple of pregnancy scares, but Markai is the only cast member to have a subsequent pregnancy. (That we know about.)

Markai’s main concern was not for herself, or even for the possible second child, she was worried for the child she already had. How would another baby affect Kari’s quality of life?

“We would have to sacrifice her life. I couldn’t do that to my child. I wouldn’t choose abortion as a first option for anybody, it’s the toughest decision ever to make in your life but this is the best choice for me. But with regards to my life and my daughter, I know I’ll make it through,” she says.

Like Maraki, over 60 percent of women who have an abortion are already mothers. One of the most common reasons women cite for needing an abortion is providing for the child or children they already have. In fact, in Jewish law, if a pregnancy threatens the well-being of a woman or her family, she is permitted–and in life-threatening cases, required–to have an abortion. While ultra-Orthodox authorities now tend to agree with Christian views against abortion, Jewish law in general values the living before the unborn–particularly in the very beginning when the embryo is considered in the Talmud to be “mere water.” (www.religioustolerance.org)

No Easy Decision also included two other young women’s stories. At age 17 Natalia had to stand in front of a judge, alone, and ask for an exemption from the parental consent law in her state. She even sold her Prom ticket to help pay for her abortion. After hearing her story I don’t know how anyone could claim teens can’t make important life decisions. Another woman on the show, Katie was a bit older, having just completed her junior year in college, but she still felt that she was in no position to raise a child.

I know a lot of people will say these women should “close their legs” or give their babies up for adoption. But that, coming from people who claim to love the unborn and value life, just implies that pregnancy is a woman’s punishment for having sex–which is kind of strange if babies are also a beautiful gift from God.

While abortion is definitely a sensitive topic, it is not a new one. Women have been ending pregnancies since time began. Abortion is, of course, a legal medical procedure and has been for 40 years. In fact, abortion was only illegal for less than 100 years, and not because of religion. Reformers in the mid- to late 1800’s claimed to be protecting women from a dangerous and unsanitary procedure, as a pretext to the growing movement of male doctors taking pregnancy and childbirth out of the until then exclusive hands of midwives. Abortion was not even condemned by the church until that time. Before then, the topic was largely ignored in any official capacity; otherwise opinions varied widely depending on the time period. The fixation on abortion as a religious issue is a very new phenomenon. (Our Bodies, Ourselves For The New Century.)

Markai’s Facebook page was attacked by people who disagree with her choice. She was called a whore, a murderer, an unfit parent, and worse. I would like to ask these people: since abortion has existed for all of human recorded history, what does a world in which abortion is unnecessary look like? Obviously it has nothing to do with an imaginary utopia of the past in which all pregnancies occur within financially secure marriages. Are you willing to put the extensive social and economic supports in place that would ensure no woman has to make the same choice as Markai? Or do you just want to shame and terrorize women?

I applaud the young women of No Easy Decision for being willing to put their stories on national television in a direct, honest light.